Comment by jarboot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jarboot | Hacker News Reader

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The request looks like "https://neal.fun/api/infinite-craft/pair?first=Phoenix&secon..." so it's probably typically caching the combination of phoenix+seeds but if there is no cache entry it would use llama to make up something. If there's a lot of attention on the site the llm service might be down or overloaded. And given the exponential/factoral (?) amount of combinations this may be reached surprisingly quickly. Just a guess.

As an aside, the game is technically interesting, being a really simple example of using llm generation for game mechanics. But it is not engaging at all and feels nonsensical to me, especially when compared to little alchemy https://littlealchemy2.com/.

I'm not trying to be negative and this isn't a dig on creativity of the wonderful Neal but more points to the immaturity of llms applied to games, maybe to my overexposure to chatgpt, and maybe a prediction that human touch will always be required to make something entertaining. I'm curious how llms will fit into an engaging game experience in the future.

>As an aside, the game is technically interesting, being a really simple example of using llm generation for game mechanics. But it is not engaging at all and feels nonsensical to me

You just gotta make a game out of it.

For example challenge yourself to try to craft "pizza".

Can even try to do it in as least number of crafts as possible.

Point is, just crafting random things to see what it spits out is OK, but trying to use your own logic to combine things to get to an arbitrary solution you come up with is much more engaging, at least to me.

Challenge your friends to craft some specific "thing". Think of something you might think could be hard to craft to, and ask them to do the same and see who can get there first, or in the fewest steps.

I tried your challenge to create pizza. My goal is to get some kind of food, but combining combinations of water, plants, fire, etc are way more likely to produce dragons and universes. I eventually got to chestnut which got to bread, but it was a lot easier to get to "Toast Toast Toast" or "Chestnutzilla" or "Treasure" + "Toast" = "Pirate". I finally got "Tostzilla" which has a pizza emoji, and then "lunch", and "breakfast", and "party"+"toast"="celebration" ?? but it feels random and illogical at some point I just gave up.

So to me it feels like playing against a soulless vector database rather than something engaging and well-crafted. I think what gives me this impression is that things are commonly related to each other using words rather than their meaning -- getting from "pirate" to "captain crunch" to "serial killer" is obviously following lines of language rather than the core concepts that relate objects. This is directly opposed to the actual act of crafting which is 100% rooted in the material world and has no relationship to language.

Maybe I'm losing my imagination, but doing it like you suggest, creating challenges, is makes it more fun. I think I'm just tired of thinking in language.

I'm also seeing a lot of my favorite game creators on twitter enjoying the toy and I'll trust their taste over mine :)

That's a fairly big challenge since the game gets less coherent the longer it goes on. The early matches generally make sense, but after about 3 levels you start getting loops, and after 5 levels you start getting nonsense or outright failures from queries.

If you figure each of the things is an input parameter to a LLM this makes a lot of sense. They tend to have short memories and struggle with higher level introspection. Great for demos, but fraught with problems when using them to do real work.

Hmm, I’m not finding it to be too big of a challenge.

It’s a bit challenging yeah, but me and my friends are challenging each other to get to words and we can usually find a way to make it.

Things like “Godzilla”, “Universe”, “Vampire”, “Optimus Prime”, “Vodka”, etc are just some examples we did.

I don’t seem to be having problems going dozens of levels deep without loops and not running into many query failures. Results that are deep are still making some logical combinational sense to me at least.

Some words we haven’t been able to make, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. It just means we need to get more creative and sometimes think outside the box. There are so many ways you can approach getting to a certain result in my experience so far.

Doing this has been fun and challenging so far for me and my friends FWIW.

> But it is not engaging at all and feels nonsensical to me, especially when compared to little alchemy https://littlealchemy2.com/.

On the other hand, Little Alchemy doesn't have answers to the most basic combinations. Air + Earth = Dust, but Dust doesn't combine with Water. Earth + Water = Mud, but Mud doesn't combine with Air. Earth + Earth = Land, but Land doesn't combine with Fire.

It may be more sensical since it limits combinations to 0.01% of what's possible, but I don't think that makes it more interesting.

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